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Huntsman Corporation (HUN)

Q2 2017 Earnings Call· Thu, Jul 27, 2017

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Q2 2017 Huntsman Corporation Earnings Conference Call, hosted by Ivan Marcuse. My name is will a Lashonda, and I'll be your event operator. At this time, all participants are in listen-only made. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded for replay purposes. I would now like turn the conference over to your host for today, Mr. Ivan Marcuse, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please proceed.

Ivan M. Marcuse - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Thank you, Lashonda; and good morning, everyone. I am Ivan Marcuse, Huntsman Corporation's Vice President of Investor Relations. Welcome to Huntsman's second quarter 2017 earnings call. Joining us on the call today are Jon Huntsman, our Founder and Executive Chairman; Peter Huntsman, President and CEO; Sean Douglas, Executive Vice President and CFO; Simon Turner to be the President CEO of Venator; and Kurt Ogden, to be the Senior Vice President and CFO of Venator. This morning, before the market opened, we released our earnings for the second quarter and first half 2017 via press release and posted it to our website, Huntsman.com. We also posted a set of slides on our website, which we will use on the call this morning while presenting our results. During the call, we may make statements about our projections or expectations for the future. All such statements are forward-looking statements. And while they reflect our current expectations, they involve risks and uncertainties and are not guarantees of future performance. You should review our filings and the Securities and Exchange Commission for more information regarding the factors of that could cause actual results to differ materially from these projections or expectations. We do not plan on publicly updating or revising any forward-looking statements during the quarter. We will also refer to non-GAAP financial measures, such as adjusted EBITDA, adjusted net income, or loss and free cash flow. You can find reconciliations to most directly comparable GAAP financial measures in our earnings release, which has been posted to our website at Huntsman.com. Lastly, as you are aware, we have continued to pursue the separation of our Pigments and Additives business through the formation of Venator. In our prepared remarks, we will comment on second quarter performance of our Pigments and Additives segment and the material factors underlying period-to-period changes in this business. While conference call participants may ask questions about the Pigments and Additives segment during the Q&A portion of this call, we want to advise participants in advance that we may refrain from answering certain questions due to securities laws, restrictions that currently apply to our communications related to this segment. In our earnings release this morning, we reported second quarter 2017 revenue of $2.6 billion, adjusted EBITDA of $413 million, and adjusted earnings of $0.85 per diluted share. I will now turn the call over to Peter Huntsman, our President and CEO.

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Thank you very much, Ivan. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for taking the time to join us this morning. Let's turn to slide number 3. Adjusted EBITDA for our Polyurethanes division was $167 million. Our MDI Urethanes business, which includes propylene oxide, recorded adjusted EBITDA of $165 million, which is up $13 million over the prior-year quarter in spite of a $15 million planned Rotterdam turnaround impact. It should be noted that our Urethanes business continues to consistently report 18% EBITDA margin. Our strategy and strategic focus remain on growing our differentiated downstream MDI portfolio. In the first half of this year, we completed a planned maintenance project at our MDI facility in Rotterdam. As noted, this planned project, which occurs once every four years, impacted our results in Q2 by $15 million, in total by $20 million for the first half of 2017. We also had an unplanned outage at our PO/MTBE facility that decreased EBITDA by $10 million in the quarter. As a result of the planned Rotterdam maintenance, our ability to grow MDI was impacted, down 6% overall versus prior year. Excluding the impact of our maintenance activities in the second quarter, our MDI growth would have been 4%, which even so is capped because of capacity constraints. End market demand for MDI remained strong. We expect our own growth to be positive next quarter now that we have our major maintenance activities behind us. Our North American business grew at 7% versus prior year, driven by higher volumes in composite wood products and growth in our downstream differentiated consumer businesses. We were capacity-constrained in Europe and Asia, and we strategically grew our differentiated portfolio, while deselecting cyclical component volumes. Underlying demand in both regions remained strong across our insulation, automotive and ace businesses. While we expected…

Sean Douglas - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Thank you, Peter. Our adjusted EBITDA increased to $413 million in the second quarter of 2017, compared to $317 million in the prior-year period, pro forma for the sale of our European Surfactants business. Let's look in on slide eight. The two biggest drivers of this year-over-year improvement in adjusted EBITDA were volume and price, which were only partially offset by higher direct costs and the maintenance outage that Peter noted earlier. Compared to the prior quarter, our adjusted EBITDA increased to $413 million from adjusted EBITDA of $329 million in the first quarter. The $84 million sequential improvement in adjusted EBITDA was again primarily driven by volume and price, which were more than offset by higher direct costs and outages. Turning to slide nine, we ended the quarter with approximately $1.3 billion of liquidity, the same level of liquidity as at the end of last quarter, even after paying down $157 million of debt in the quarter and reducing the size of our securitization facility by €75 million in preparation for the separation of our Pigments and Additives division. Free cash flow generation remains a high priority for our company in 2017. In the second quarter, we generated $251 million in free cash flow, including $90 million from a tax refund in the second quarter. As we explained, last year, we enjoyed an unusual material benefit from a step-change in our working capital as compared with this year's second quarter. That step-change benefit amounted to approximately $250 million throughout the year. We continue to focus heavily on optimal working capital management and have managed to retain the step-change secured last year. Free cash flow in the quarter was $31 million below last year, primarily due to this difference in working capital, partially offset by an increase of $88 million…

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Thank you, Sean. Our current priorities as a company are threefold. First, to increase the value of Huntsman Corporation and operate it as safely and responsibly as possible; second, to complete the separation of our Pigments and Additives business; and third, complete our announced merger with Clariant. I would like to comment on each of these objectives. The non-Pigments-and-Additives divisions of Huntsman collectively showed improvements over a year ago and the previous quarter. We see continued room for improvement in growth and margins. Additionally, we continue to generate strong free cash flow and paid down an additional $100 million of debt just this week. Sean just noted for the first half of 2017, we realized $333 million of free cash flow, and excluding Pigments and Additives from the second half of 2017, we target generating in excess of $150 million of additional free cash flow. As a reminder, since the beginning of 2015, we paid down over $800 million of debt. Let's move on to slide number 10. With respect to our second objective, the separation of our Pigments and Additives business, on Monday, July 24, we launched the IPO of our Pigments and Additives division known as Venator. We successfully undertook the issuance of new debt financing for Venator in preparation for the separation, including a bond offering of $375 million with a coupon of 5.75% due 2025 and commitments for a term loan B of $375 million due 2024 at LIBOR plus 3%. Venator will also have an asset-based loan with a commitment of $300 million upon closing. Once the IPO successfully completed, Venator will return back roughly $725 million of net proceeds to Huntsman, which will be used to reduce debt. This will be in addition to the IPO proceeds we expect to receive upon closing the…

Ivan M. Marcuse - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Thank you, Peter. Lashonda, will you explain the procedure for Q&A then open the line for questions?

Operator

Operator

Absolutely. Your first question comes from the line of Kevin McCarthy.

Kevin W. McCarthy - Vertical Research Partners LLC

Analyst

Yes. Good morning. Couple questions on MDI. Peter, it sounds like your volumes there would have been about 4% as adjusted for various things. How do you think that compares to the market rate of demand growth? And do you have any price increases on the table for the third quarter in that business?

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Well, if you look at our MDI on a pro forma basis, again, if I strip out the outages that we had because of the planned maintenance, we saw volumes increase in North America – U.S. and Canada markets by about 8%. We would have seen growth in Europe of about 7%. And we would have been down a little bit in APAC as we redeploy MDI around the world and so forth. We certainly are starting to bump up against capacity constraints. If we had the volume, we'd be able to sell it into the marketplace. And I think that our additional capacity that will be coming in Caojing at the end of the year, early part of next year is going to be very important for us to be able to continue that growth. But even without the growth of more MDI – of crude MDI, we're continuing to take the crude MDI that we're selling into the market, the MDI that we're selling into the market and moving that into our formulation and downstream system houses as aggressively as we can. And that will be the area of the business that we'll continue to see the growth in the margin expansion going forward.

Kevin W. McCarthy - Vertical Research Partners LLC

Analyst

Great. And then, Peter, as a second question, if I may, with regard to the pending Clariant MOE, you've had some activists emerge. What can you say about your confidence level that Clariant will gain shareholder approval and this will proceed?

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Well, I've had the opportunity since the time of closing. Matter of fact, I got to spend the majority of my time since the time of closing having had the opportunity to spend with my counterpart and my colleagues in Clariant. And the vast majority, 90% of that time, I've been visiting Huntsman and mostly Clariant long-term shareholders. And I would just say that there's virtual unanimous agreement in this transaction particularly as individuals have a right – or have – take the time to look into it, the similarities, the opportunities of transactional revenues and synergies coming from this merger. This really is building an industry leader. And I'm very confident that this is going to have shareholder support. And that it's going to be going through.

Kevin W. McCarthy - Vertical Research Partners LLC

Analyst

Thanks very much, Peter.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Robert Koort. Please proceed. Robert Koort - Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC: Thank you very much. Peter, I guess, I had two questions. You'd mentioned holing the Venator shares for a temporary timeframe. Can you talk about what the thought process is on how you'll proceed there? And then secondly, it looks like in your merger sides, maybe a new characterization of plastics and coating and textiles effects is managed for cash and turnaround. Given that textiles have been part of the Venator spin originally, does that suggest it could also be a candidate for divestiture and maybe that's one of the other ways to manage the cash is to generate it through asset sales? Thanks.

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Yeah. I think that as we think about the remaining Huntsman shares in Venator, we're obviously in a lock-up period for the next six months. And so we won't be seeing any secondaries unless market conditions would allow us to do that. I'd like to see us be able to monetize those shares as soon as we can. I certainly don't want to fire-sale them. And Venator is a great company. It's going to have a great future going forward. As I look into 2017, 2018, 2019, as I look at the long-term pricing trends and so forth, I think it's a great company. It's heading in a great direction. So we would like to see those shares going to the hands of investors that want to keep – that want to invest in Venator on the long term, and we'll be selling those shares as we have an opportunity to do so. But, again, I wouldn't see that there's going to be a mass exit or panic of trying to get out of these as quickly as possible. This is an orderly transition that will be taking place here. Let's see. With regards to the second question around textile effects, I think that we've looked at textile effects. Again, I think we mentioned at our Investor Day a year, year-and-a-half ago that this is a business that we're expecting to continue to see improvements. We expected it to move towards a triple-digit EBITDA level, a double-digit margin level, and a double-digit return on asset level, which a year-and-a-half ago, two years ago, it wasn't doing any of those things. And today, we're running at about a 15% RONA, and we're up over 10% of margins in the business. We're up almost 13%. And we continue to see this business…

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Frank Mitsch.

Frank J. Mitsch - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Hey. Good morning, gentlemen. Hey, on the Performance Products business, that was one area of key upside. I was wondering if you could talk about the pace of your business throughout Q2 and how it started here in Q3. And you also mentioned that you were able to realize higher pricing in response to higher raws. How should we think about the interplay between pricing and raws in that segment and the sustainability of the improvement? I think you mentioned, Peter, that you are expecting year-over-year improvement there despite the turnaround?

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Yes. I would just say, typically, with Performance Products, second quarter is our strongest quarter that we have. So I'm not sure that when we talk about a seasonally slower third quarter, that shouldn't be a surprise. But I would certainly say that even with the expense of the turnaround in the third quarter, that $15 million to $20 million of expense, we believe that we'll be over the previous year. And I think the strength in that business, if we look at on a quarter-to-quarter basis, year-over-year, we're up in amines on EBITDA, we're up in surfactants on EBITDA, we're up in our maleic anhydride EBITDA. And these are all quality businesses that I think when I talked about a business that's back on a normalized run-rate, if you look over the last couple of years, this has been a business that's operating in the high-teens. 18% EBITDA to sales. And I would expect this business to continue to improve throughout the remainder of the year in comparison to 2016. And I think the business has a very strong future to it.

Frank J. Mitsch - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Well, and to that end, is there anything that you're aware of in terms of capacity additions in either amines or maleic that might pressure 2018? Or the way that we should think about this business as it is now as you say back on the right trajectory?

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

I think that when we look at large world scale projects that would be adding meaningful capacities of amines and maleic into the industry, which I think would be the two businesses that I would be most concerned around capacity utilization. I think that – I don't foresee anything in the industry. I don't see any big projects that are coming on. So as I look out into 2018, 2019, I think this division is going to continue to be very strong and gradually continue to strengthen as it has over the last couple of years. This will be the business, too. As you look at the greatest synergy opportunities, where we see meaningful operating synergies, marketing sales, technological overlaps between Huntsman and Clariant, it is between Performance Products and the Care Chemicals and the Natural Resources, where you see a lot of the amines businesses. We're selling into the amines chemistry going into the oilfield services. Huntsman gets very excited about the idea, Frank, that we've got dozens of people working in this area to expand this end of the business for us. Clariant has hundreds of trucks that are throughout the North American U.S. market. When we talk about the combination between our amines business and the Clariant Natural Resources division, there's great overlap. When you look at the technology in amines and surfactants and so forth that we have in Performance Products, the EO chain, when we look at the EO chain of chemistry that Clariant has in Europe, again, you're looking overall between these three divisions that I just mentioned. You're looking at over a third of our combined businesses that have obvious overlap. And that's where we've looked and have already, we believe, we've seen an excess of 2% of revenues, 20% sort of margin business. So as I look at just Performance Products on a standalone basis, great division. It's going to continue to improve over the next couple of years. I look at the Performance Products, and I overlap that with Care Chemicals and Natural Resources with Clariant, it's going to be an even better business. Even stronger business that'll have cost opportunities to be taken out and revenue enhancement and margin enhancement that will be coming in. So this will obviously be a very core business going forward.

Frank J. Mitsch - Wells Fargo Securities LLC

Analyst

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from Mike Hanson [ph]. Please proceed.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst

Hey, can you hear me?

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Yes, we can.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst

Sorry, I didn't know if that was me or not. So I apologize. Hey, Peter, in terms of EBITDA growth for 2017, on slide 10, you highlighted the new Huntsman less Venator. What type of growth do you think you can generate in 2017, and then, maybe just longer term, this portfolio on its own should generate what type of earnings growth?

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Well, as we look at this without Pigments and Additives, we certainly would be looking here at probably – I would say, you need to look on division-by-division basis, but we certainly ought to be doing, I would think, 1.5 times to 2 times GDP on a macro basis when we talk about consistent earnings growth. Now, some divisions are going to grow faster than and others slower than that and so forth. But certainly better than GDP sort of growth on an EBITDA basis. Cash flow generation is going to continue to be very strong. And as I look out over the next two years to three years, we've just completed, as I mentioned in my script, some very large projects in China, a joint venture project on PO/MTBE and new MDI plants will be coming on at the end of this year, an amines capacity this past year in Singapore, an MDI expansion in Rotterdam. We are very well-equipped to satisfy better than GDP growth in all of our businesses by the end of this year, better than GDP growth in all of our businesses for the next couple of years. And so I would consider us over the next couple years having stronger than GDP growth and to be able to maintain strong free cash flow.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst

Okay. And then, moving to the Huntsman-Clariant, I was intrigued with your new commentary that you can add 2% revenue growth annually by leveraging Care Chemicals, Performance Products, Natural Resources and the EBITDA margins would be pretty good. Can you maybe give us a little bit more color on how that flows through over the next couple of years?

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Well, I think that as we look at that, and I do have to be general because these are areas that we need to have government approval on. So we've not had an opportunity to get into customer-by-customer, product-by-product in pricing on these things and nor will we be able to until probably the time of closing around year-end. As we look at our existing customer base – our existing customers, particularly, in North America, and we ask if we were to have the Clariant technology, the products and so forth, if we can add their supply chain into our existing supply chain, what benefits would we see internally in these areas? We don't want to be looking at Clariant customers, and what we're seeing is that there's a tremendous amount of complementary production here. Not competing products. We supply many of the same customers, but we supply them different applications and different formulations. And when you bring these together, and when you bring the routes to market that Huntsman has particularly in North America, we see real benefit. If we look at particularly the routes to market that Clariant has and their advantageous supply chain, raw material positioning and so forth in Europe, I think that's very strong. We get very excited when we look at those sort of opportunities from marketing and sales basis. When we look at where we're trying to go in Natural Resources and so forth in our own businesses, and where we've started to move in the last couple of years with our amines and moving downstream in amines, we're the largest producer of amines. I think we're the lowest cost producer of amines globally when you take our entire portfolio, and we want to move that further downstream. We want to accelerate the growth of our amines. And the combination of Clariant, obviously, we're there already in many of those downstream applications, we take a very steady and a very competitive supply chain and we put it together with their further downstream. And again, I talk about a 2% revenue on the size of company like this with a 20% margin. We will certainly be able to put more clarity into that as we get closer and as we're able to – from a regulatory clearance perspective, be able to look at this in greater detail. But thus far, everything that we see tells us that the opportunities are going to be greater there and not less.

Unknown Speaker

Analyst

Great. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Ahmed Hassan. Please proceed.

Hassan I. Ahmed - Alembic Global Advisors LLC

Analyst

Morning, Peter.

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Good morning.

Hassan I. Ahmed - Alembic Global Advisors LLC

Analyst

Peter, obviously, as I take a look at your MDI results, I mean, not Polyurethanes generally, but MDI, in particular. Margins have been quite steady-Eddie. High teens, call it, 18% this quarter. From the sounds of it, supply/demand fundamentals seem quite snug. It seems demand at least in the near- to medium-term, demand growth will exceed supply growth. So first question is, are you in agreement that at least near- to medium-term, despite some incremental capacity coming online, supply/demand fundamentals should continue to be tight? So that's the first part. Second part is that as one sort of sits there and thinks about further tightness within the MDI chain, how much higher could your MDI margins go from where they are right now?

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Well, as I look at the supply and demand, I would strongly – well, I'd agree very much with what you had to say, and I would just note that as we look at the health of our MDI business, we're reporting here $144 million just in MDI. And I would just note that $15 million was the cost of the maintenance impact on Rotterdam. So really as we look at our second quarter 2017 margins and pro forma basis, it's around $159 million, $160 million versus $125 million of where we were last year. So as I look at that supply and demand basis, I do think that it's going to be a relatively snug market over the course of the next couple of years here. As we look at the large world scale projects that have been announced, there are only two of them that are really out there. I'm talking about large grassroots facilities. One of them is the Dow Sadara and I think that a lot of that – they're going through their start-up right now, and I suspect that a lot of the pre-marketing for that is already out in the market. Their people have been out obviously pre-selling that material. So the impact of that while volumetrically may not be in the market, I think from a pricing perspective is already affecting parts of the market. And then, Huntsman will be coming on with our project early next year. After that, I don't see large grassroots facilities, nothing that's on the horizon. I would remind you that it takes a couple of years to build these facilities, permit them, engineer, build them, and commission them. So I think that we're in a pretty well-balanced market environment for the next couple of years. I would…

Hassan I. Ahmed - Alembic Global Advisors LLC

Analyst

Understood. Understood. Very helpful. Now, as a follow-up, on the other side of things, as I take a look at your raw material costs, some of the core raw materials, be it benzene, be it methanol, and the like, came down decently through the course of Q2. So just trying to get a sense of, A, what sort of a tailwind was that for you, be it on a quarter-over-quarter, or year-over-year basis? And then, part and parcel with that, you're guiding to being able to generate over $115 million in free cash in the back half of the year. So just trying to get a feel of what sort of a raw material pricing environment are you baking into that forecast?

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

I think that on a macro basis, we're assuming that crude and natural gas really stays fairly consistent. You're going to see some choppiness in the downstream. A year ago at this time crude was in the mid to high $40s, and as we look at second quarter, crude WTI, though we don't buy, it is an indicator, it was at $48. As we look at natural gas a year ago, it was around $2, and today it's around $3, Benzene's moved up a little bit. It's up 9%, 10% over the last year. Butane a big raw material for us, it's up 20%. You're going to see some choppiness in that. But I think most of our businesses are – the products are running at solid capacities and we have enough downstream applications. You might see a quarter delay in the raw materials that we take, and the prices that we're able to pass on to customers. But I think within a quarter or two, we ought to be able to most all of our products are strong enough today, downstream enough, differentiated enough, we ought to be able to pass through those price – raw material price movements.

Hassan I. Ahmed - Alembic Global Advisors LLC

Analyst

Very helpful. Thank you so much, Peter

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of John Roberts. Please proceed.

John Roberts - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

Good morning.

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Good morning.

Sean Douglas - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Good morning.

John Roberts - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

How many segments do you think you'll ultimately end up with after the merger?

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Less than the reported eight that we have today.

John Roberts - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

Can you narrow that range at all?

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Well, I would, but I think that's something that we're working on very closely with our counterparts. And until we've had an opportunity to really go through and get regulatory approval and look at customers' chemistries, applications and so forth, we would like to try to obviously simplify it, make sure that there's clarity on a financial reporting basis. But, yes, we would like to definitely get it down lower than where we are today. But I am just simply not in a position where we're going to say it's going to be four divisions, six divisions, or anything like that.

John Roberts - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

All right. And more operationally, are you fully self-sufficient on PO and polyols? And to move more MDI downstream, do you need to buy or build more PO or polyol capacity?

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

I think that we're in a very good position right now with propylene oxide. We are a large, very competitive producer, a low-cost producer in North America. We're a net buyer in the European markets. We have long-term agreements. And obviously, with the completion of our PO/MTBE joint venture we have in China, we'll be sufficiently supplied in China. So I do not see PO or polyols, either one, as being a limiting factor on the growth of profitability of our MDI downstream formulation business going forward.

John Roberts - UBS Securities LLC

Analyst

Thank you.

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Your next question comes from the line of Laurence Alexander. Please proceed.

Laurence Alexander - Jefferies LLC

Analyst

Good morning.

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Good morning.

Laurence Alexander - Jefferies LLC

Analyst

Two quick questions. I think that it was back in 2016 you were highlighting your growth project pipeline, which I think was about $2.5 billion of investment for about $300 million, $400 million EBITDA tailwind. What's your current thinking for what the pipeline for growth projects might be for 2018 to 2020? So that's the first one. And then the second question is for the standalone new Huntsman, how much leakage do you expect for any pension costs, run-rate restructuring, other cash flow items that would be a bit of a drag on the cash flow bridge post the Venator spin?

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Well, I'll go ahead and answer the growth project, and turn over to Sean the other questions. On the growth projects, I would say, Laurence, that over the last two years to three years, we've had fairly heavy capital investment in areas that we thought we would be needing excess capacity. And that would include our MDI, our downstream PO, which we're satisfying through joint ventures, our downstream MDI that we have through our Caojing expansion, through our expansion in Rotterdam. We spent a lot of money in restructuring, expanding our capabilities in advanced materials and the aerospace industry. We spent several hundred million dollars in restructuring and expanding and investing in the Venator assets as well. Our titanium dioxide. And I think that that $300 million in benefit that we see on an overall basis. If I look at just where we were last year to where we will come out this year, if we kept the Pigments and Additives business as part of our portfolio, I think you'll see much of that $300 million just in this year to last year improvement that we'll see in EBITDA because of that investment. That's just over one year. So I think that investment is very sound over the last couple of years. Now, as I look going forward, I think that the real growth drivers are going to be taking the volume that's coming out of those capacities and continuing to move that further downstream. Moving that into formulations, moving that downstream into amines, moving it downstream through system houses, through the bolt-on acquisitions. I just announced one today in the UK. Another one and so as I look at our MDI business, roughly about 25% of our EBITDA comes through these smaller bolt-on acquisitions that take our MDI, move it downstream, and we make more EBITDA margin than we otherwise would be making, if we were just selling into the market – into the polyurethanes market. So as I look over the next couple of years, I see real opportunity to take the volume, move it downstream, less capital-intensive, more R&D, more differentiated higher margin sort of opportunity.

Sean Douglas - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Great. I'll take the second question. As we look at restructuring and we try to bridge it together when we take Pigments and Additives out, Pigments and Additives does carry a little bit of the lion's share there of restructuring going forward. With that coming out, there's not a lot left in terms of restructuring cash, that's going to be paid out the door. You think about second half, think about roughly $20 million of restructuring cash that would be left in the Huntsman portfolio excluding the Venator business. And if you look at pensions, there's truly a little bit of a benefit there that will come to Huntsman as that goes out as Venator has a little bit of cash flow there as well.

Ivan M. Marcuse - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Operator, I think with the constraint on time, we'll take one more question.

Operator

Operator

Your last question comes from the line of Jim Sheehan. Please proceed.

James Sheehan - SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Inc.

Analyst

Thank you. Peter, where do you see global MDI operating rates today? And where do you see them going once your Caojing unit starts up?

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Global operating rates stay probably, I would say, in the low 90%s. Again, that's a tough number to talk about – well, to try to calculate, because when I look at global operating rates, you're looking at design capacities. And oftentimes MDI facilities in particular because they are trickier facilities to run, if you have a facility that's designed to operate at 400,000 metric tons, it's pretty rare that you actually get that 400,000 metric tons out of it, because you're constantly having to go through maintenance work, T&Is and so forth. So oftentimes, we look at this capacity utilization on a theoretical basis that looks like today that it would be in the high 80%s, around 90%. I would say globally that we're in the low 90%, though it feels in some areas that it's tighter than that. I would imagine that Europe is in the mid to high 90%s. America, it feels like is in the mid to high 90%s, and Asia is obviously below 90%. But, again, as I look at Asia, I continue to see what feels like pretty good market conditions in Asia, margin-wise, demand and growth. And I'm not sure that that stated capacity in Asia is – that necessarily means that's how much MDI you can actually produce. So sorry. That's a rather long answer, but oftentimes, you look at a lot of these analyst reports and so forth that are showing MDI and somebody will start an MDI facility up midway through the next year, and they'll show that facility starting up several hundred thousand metric tons over night, and then it just operates at that going forward. And that just is not the case in MDI. These facilities take months to commission and start up. And as we've seen over the last couple of years, not just in Huntsman, but in the industry, these facilities, especially, the larger you build them, you get a single contaminant that goes in, and the entire facility comes down, and you're going through that start-up procedure all over again. So it feels that we're right globally around 90%-plus.

James Sheehan - SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Inc.

Analyst

Great. And there's been a new propylene oxide project announced in Texas in the next few years. Can you talk about supply/demand balances in that business? And how you see that developing over the course of time as that starts up?

Peter R. Huntsman - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Well, that's a lot of PO. I obviously had nothing to do with the decision to invest that much money and that much capacity, so I probably ought to keep my mouth shut or I'll get in trouble.

James Sheehan - SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, Inc.

Analyst

All right, Peter. Thank you.

Ivan M. Marcuse - Huntsman Corp.

Management

Great. Thank you for joining us on the call today. If you have any follow-up questions, feel free to call or email Investor Relations, and we look forward to talking with you again next quarter. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect, and have a wonderful day. Thank you.